I.

my sleeping is condensed this spring
such that two or three hours
at most will suffice for one evening.

my body is awake,
yet the wandering back alleys
behind my irises are weary,
and on the cusp of gentrification.

I see faces where there should be none

II.

and I’ve seen the lines again,
though they come far less frequently
than when I had to reach up
to grasp the doorknob.

yet they are as vivid
and bursting with clarity
as the first summer I witnessed them.

they arrive unannounced
single-hair-thick,
rotating on invisible axes,
changing color and length
within equally slim fragments of time
too small to measure in our dimension.

one summer, i recorded how often they visited
but could find no logical frequency to their appearances.

no one has ever known of them but me,
and that woman just picked up a cigarette **** to light her own.

III.

they came again yesterday,
as always, in midafternoon
at 3 o’clock, when christ died.
and i thought, not of him,
but of the time, and how
twelve hours earlier is apparently the devil’s time
a time-piece-turned inverted cross.

IV.

so, I remembered,
how at devils’ time last night,
i was adrift,
sans-sails down brick alleys
thinking not of lines,
of gods or devils and their time,
but of those pan flute notes
and how i can’t wait to hear them again.